Commentary: Under Trump, the bootlickers have come out in force. Minneapolis cements it

President Trump has an army of bootlickers that seems to stretch into the sunset. Many of them are circulating on social media and it is almost certain that a large number of them come from bot accounts on X.

Then there’s Bill Essayli. When it comes to saying anything to please a president with autocratic dreams, the former Assemblyman is a bootlicking All-Star.

Att. Gen. Pam Bondi appointed him chief prosecutor for the Central District of California in April with the explicit mandate to carry out the will of Donald J. Trump. His record so far has been, unsurprisingly, embarrassing and far-fetched.

An exodus of prosecutors who didn’t care about his staff’s shouting sessions and crude press conferences. A felony conviction against a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy for excessive force that he reduced to a misdemeanor then unsuccessfully tried to have it revoked. Seek charges against people who dared to protest Trump’s deluge of deportations, which his office ultimately scaled back, abandoned or lost in court due to lack of evidence, even though Essayli publicly boasted that they were successful cases.

The man can no longer even call himself acting U.S. attorney after a judge ruled in October that he was “not lawfully occupying” the position since he was never officially appointed in the first place. So you would think that Essayli would hear the music and go back to being an inconsequential California legislator, but no! If there’s one thing Trumpworld has shown, it’s that once you kneel to lick and shine the dear leader, you better keep going until your tongue is as dry as Death Valley.

Which brings us to this weekend. And Essayli’s bootlicking went wrong.

On Saturday morning, Minneapolis Border Patrol agents shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti after attacking him in a group. He had tried to help a woman pushed to the ground by a federal immigration agent; an officer punched him and he quickly collapsed – and shortly after, he was dead. A Department of Homeland Security social media post justified what happened by saying that Pretti seemed determined to “want[ing] to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” because he was in possession of a legally registered handgun. He never brandished it, however. In fact, several videos showed Pretti clearly holding what looked like a phone as officers swarmed him.

Even though the incident occurred thousands of miles from Los Angeles, Essayli had stick out your tongue – it’s the quickest way, after all.

“If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there’s a good chance they’re legally justified in shooting you,” he sneered on social media hours after Pretti’s death. “Don’t do it!” He also shared posts from right-wing social media influencers Jack Posobiec and Andy Ngo who claimed Pretti, a nurse in an intensive care unit at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital, was following “antifa” tactics.

Essayli quickly came under fire on social media from gun rights groups, including the NRA, which has supported Trump in all of his presidential elections.

A sign is raised in support of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during a candlelight vigil during a peaceful protest in front of the federal building in Los Angeles on Saturday.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

He called his speech “dangerous and wrong” on social media, adding that “responsible public voices should wait for a full investigation, without making generalizations or demonizing law-abiding citizens.”

The Gun Owners of America, an even more conservative group than the NRA, called Essayli’s comments “unfortunate,” leading to the first assistant U.S. attorney – because bootlickers love their headlines — to complain about the nonprofit “adding words to misrepresent my statement” even though they directly quoted it.

When history looks back at all the cowards, sycophants, apologists, shills, goons, and other miscreants who made Trump possible, the bootlickers will have a starring role. The “I voted for that” tribe – even when it comes to cruelty and actions that are more those of a Macbeth than an American president.

The bootlicker is a universally reviled archetype. Their bread and butter comforts the well-off while afflicting the most afflicted. They attempt to one-up their bootlicking colleagues with even more obsequious acts of flattery, determined to bring to life the most damning line from Orwell’s “1984”: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” This was their final, most essential order. »

The bootlicker’s moral compass is malleable. Wherever the Big Boss has moved the goal posts, that’s where he’ll kick the ball. If everything goes to hell and America turns into a rank dictatorship, beware of the bootlicker.

The Trump regime currently has a series of them that resembles the bootlicking version of the 1927 Yankees.

In addition to Essayli, you have Stephen Miller, who has repeatedly called Pretti a “murderer” and a “domestic terrorist” on social media, as if repeating these insults will make them true. Vice President JD Vance, who described Renee Good, a woman shot and killed Jan. 7 by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis after she tried to get away from him, as a “deranged leftist.”

Repeating what the big bootlickers say is a character trait. Call it the trickle-down effect.

There is the head of the Border Patrol, Gregory Bovino, a migrate A man a federal judge accused of “outright lying” during his testimony about his team’s actions in Chicago this fall. At a news conference about Pretti’s death, Bovino said the victim looked like he “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement” — the exact same language used in the Department of Homeland Security’s original social media post about the killing. Hours later, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also impersonated a macaw, repeating Miller in accusing Pretti of “domestic terrorism.”

Sunday on Fox News, FBI Director Kash Patel — the agency that once led an impartial investigation into what happened to Good, Pretti and other victims of migration — told host Maria Bartiromo that “No one who wants to be peaceful shows up to a protest with a gun. That led a skeptical-looking Bartiromo, who is about as liberal as the Spanish Inquisition, to ask, ‘And how was he using that handgun to threaten the Border Patrol?’

A wide-eyed Patel could only say he trusted Noem’s version of events.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks at a news conference Saturday to address an incident in which federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti during operations in Minneapolis.

(Al Drago/Getty Images)

These are just a few of the biggest and most powerful bootlickers currently tripping over their own deception and despair.

Space prohibits me from quoting all the Republicans who last week were staunch supporters of the 2nd Amendment now saying Pretti had no right to carry his legally registered firearm at a protest, even though they applauded Kyle Rittenhouse when the Wisconsin teen showed up to a protest very openly carrying an AR-15, which he ended up using to fatally shoot two people who tried to assault him. There is no evidence that Pretti ever handled his firearm during the protest, let alone threatened federal agents with it.

Then there are the bootlickers who applauded the January 6 rioters for standing up against what they saw as government tyranny, and who insist that the dozens of police officers injured that day were just agents of the deep state. Today, these bootlickers are telling those who oppose Trump’s police state to respect it.

Obey or die.

The Roman philosopher Plutarch described flatterers in his immortal essay on the subject as “plague in the chambers of kings and the ruin of their kingdoms” who “prey upon a noble prey.” So to Essayli, Patel, Noem and all the other bootlickers in Trump’s orbit, and the relatively anonymous legions beyond, I leave you with the warning I saw in a meme that I’m sure Plutarch would approve of:

No matter how much you lick it, the boot will never love you.